Feedback

Friday feedback banner, a man with a phone writing reviews

Friday Feedback

Hey folks! Chris is exhausted after a long, hard day of work at the Fort at No. 4, and asked me to put up a Friday Feedback for y’all.

Chris, using an 18th century warping board.

First and foremost, we went up to the Fort today because we want to warp our new loom. In order to do that, we have to get the warp thread organized. That’s done on a warping rack or warping board. You can see in the video that Chris is winding the thread along a very long pathway over several of the pegs. We figure we wound about 3900 yards of wool thread today, in about 3 hours. It was a lot of work on Chris’s part. What you see him doing in this video is a very tiny clip. Think that, done hundreds and hundreds of times. When all the winding was done, it was tied to keep it organized, and then pulled into a large hank that keeps the threads organized and neat, while making it shorter and easier to carry.

A man threading a warping board.
Chris, winding thread onto the warping board.

The warping board you see in the picture here is a proper 18th century one. We only wanted to have about 10 yards of fabric when we’re done weaving. I’m sure Chris can explain the math of this one for you later (I still don’t really get it), but three pegs on either side, wound in batches of 16 (not strings, but 16 rounds of all the pegs), basically is the warp for about 10 yards of fabric. I can’t tell you how many batches; it was a LOT. But look at all the pegs. They go all the way to the floor. It’s entirely possible that they would have used the entire board to warp a loom for many, many yards of fabric. It’s truly incredible!

Read More

Feedback box

Friday Feedback

Another week. What is your favorite childhood food? That dish that takes you back to a happy childhood memory.

Politics

The New York Times, a “newspaper” and “trusted media source” was out there downplaying the second assignation attempt on Trump.

They do such a good job of lying. Kamala should take lessons from them. They used air quotes to imply that the assignation attempt wasn’t a real thing.

Over on X, the number of people that claim that there was no assignation attempt because no shot was fired is batshit crazy.

I do love that Florida has decided to keep the investigation local and to hold on to their prisoner.
Read More

Feedback box

Friday Feedback

The blog has now been moved to a temporary server. I hope that it will be more stable. I have to move the citation server. Once that is moved, GFZ and Vine Of Liberty will be free of K8S.

I have a few other websites to move, but I am making great progress.

In the Supreme Court of Mass acutes, we had a Second Amendment win. They found that knives are arms under the plain text of the Second Amendment. As such, it was the government’s burden to show that the current regulation, a ban on switch-blade knives, was consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulations.

The state did not meet their burden, the law is facially unconstitutional.

There have been a few more wins at the district court level.

In many circuits, the district judges are applying Bruen faithfully. This led to a cascade of wins for the Second Amendment.

It is at the circuit court level where most of the clown show exists. The Fourth, Ninth, Seventh, and Second come to mind.

Answering the question of the fastest way from sheep to cap, socks or tunic. The answer is to knit them. It is but a short time to get from clean fleece to yarn suitable for knitting with.

The comments are of course open.

hand holding dunce cap hat in front of chalkboard or blackboard

Should We Trust your Statistics?

And, not to pick on you, but speaking of definitions, “collage” according to Webster is: “an artistic composition made of various materials (such as paper, cloth, or wood) glued on a surface.” “College” is: “an independent institution of higher learning offering a course of general studies leading to a bachelor’s degree,” or “an organized body of persons engaged in a common pursuit or having common interests or duties.” I hope you’re not paying a lot of tuition to teach your kids how to glue pictures to cardboard (I’d buy “it’s a typo” except you used it twice, and that impacts the forcefulness of the point you’re making; if you misused “collage” when you meant “college,” does that also call into question the accuracy of your statistics?).
Elrod

Yes, it does call into question the accuracy of my statistics.

I do make mistakes. This is one of the reasons I often put citations in my articles. That is so you can check my work.

It is also why I put my math in documents. I don’t just give you a number. I tell you how I got to that number. I.e. I show my work.

P(A)=fN

Where P(A) is the probability of an event (A) occurring, f the frequency of the event, and N is the total number of occurrences.

So if there is a 1 in 5 chance, the probability is 15=0.200.

The probability of events A and B happens is P(A and B)=P(A)×P(B).

Using De Morgan’s Law, we know that NOT (A or B) is equal to NOT A and NOT B. When addressing the question of rape, we are looking for the probability of a woman NOT being raped in year 1 AND of not being raped in years 2, and so forth. This if the probability of being raped is 1 in 4 while in collage, that means that we have NOT(P(rape(y1)) or P(rape(y2)) or P(rape(y3)) or P(rape(y4)) = 3/4 = 0.75. Y1 through y4 represent years at collage. We are assuming a four-year collage.

P(rape(yN)) is fixed at some value, for the sake of argument and ease of calculation.

P(rape(Y))4=0.75 P(rape(Y))=0.754 P(rape(Y))=0.930604859

Now that we know what the probability of a woman not being raped, per year, while in collage. We can restate it as the probability of a woman being raped. That is simply 10.930604859 or 0.06939514. Converting to a percentage, that gives us a 6.94% chance of a woman being raped per year at collage.

We want to convert this to per capita using 100K. This is simply multiplying the percentage by 100,000 which gives us 6939 per 100,000 women attending collage.

You can verify the formulas used at —How To Calculate Probability: Formula, Examples and Steps, Indeed Career Guide, (last visited Aug. 4, 2024).

So what about the other direction? I used two sources. One was found using “rapes per capita by state” and the other was “rapes per capita by country”. The value given for rapes per capita by states for the US was 40 per 100k. The per country gave us 41.77 per 100k. This being close enough to 40 that I choose to use the 40 per 100k as being “good enough”.
Rape Statistics by Country 2024, (last visited Aug. 4, 2024)

Using 40/100000 gives us P(rape(Y))=0.0004. This gives the probability of not being raped as 0.9996. Using our formula for multiple occurrences and using a 50-year span, we get 0.999650=0.9802. This means that the probability of a woman being raped over the course of 50 years is 0.0198 or 1.98%.

As Elrod stated, this all depends on your definition of rape. Definitions matter. As an example, in some countries, like the UK, it is not a murder unless the person is convicted of murder. So, again as Elrod said, a man with 6 bullet holes in the back of his head is just a dead person, not a murder victim, until and unless a person is convicted of the crime.

Rape is much the same. Different places have different definitions. In particular, the US statistics I used were “forcible rape”. This has a better definition than just the word “rape”.

All of the above is just to get to the following paragraph.

I struggle with dyslexia. The result of this is that once I type a word, it always looks correct to me. Or almost always. Spell checkers go a long way to fixing simple misspellings. I have to work to misspell a word.

I also pay for a plugin called LanguageTool. This does grammar analysis as well. Unfortunately, if the word I am using is grammatical correct, LanguageTool often does not catch my errors.

In the course of an article, I will expect between 10 and 100 error corrections. I apologize for those that get through.

Here is a word that I hope you do not struggle with, sweet and sweat. One of those words means a nice thing to eat, filled with yummy sugar like flavor. The other is what happens when you exercise.

I don’t think you want me to give you a sweat tart on Halloween.

I believe I have that correct, I would have to look up the word in a dictionary in order to double-check it.

So please, if I make a mistake, call me on it. If I don’t give you the references, it is likely because I didn’t bother to click the buttons to make a citation, I was lazy. Call me on it.

Friday Feedback

I am so pleased that Ally has stepped up her postings. It helps me keep going.

I’ve had way to many 503 errors recently. This is the service is temporarily unavailable error message.

At issue is a resource allocation problem. I’ve added a couple of new sites to the mix, added a mail service, and suddenly, there aren’t enough resources to go around.

There are two fixes, more hardware, or to reduce the load. I have reduced the load somewhat, I’ll be reducing it still more.

The issue isn’t even that the pods are dying. That I can work around with replicas. It is that an entire node is going down. When that happens, it is 5 minutes before the node is fully up and all the pods repopulate.

On the great news, Miguel has found a place to post his thoughts. It is good to see him posting again.

From a personal perspective, I know that it seems like it was just one tweet that killed GunFreeZone.net. It isn’t.

Miguel ran out of go juice for the blog over two years ago. He wanted to kill it then. J.Kb. and I asked if we could take over his baby and he agreed. Over time, the site morphed from Miguel’s baby to something else.

I’ve read remarks about how GFZ was so much worse, once I started posting regularly. That’s fine. It hurts at one level, but I realize that I am not Miguel.

One of the things that I have noticed, is that there isn’t a Vine of Liberty “voice” yet. I’m working towards it.

We are still looking for more guest posts. Poor Elrod was the first victim. His well-written comment was promoted to a front page post. I hope he takes it as the compliment I intended it to be.

Which leaves the two questions of for the day:

1) What one thing is missing from the site which you want back, right now? And no, you can’t just say “Miguel”, I’ve already told him that I want him here.
2) What topic do you think is in line with The Vine of Liberty, which isn’t being covered?

Thank you for being here, it means a lot.

Friday Feedback

Well, we made it another week.

The site still isn’t to where I need it. But it is functional. I have imported all of my posts from GFZ. This is a step forward.

I am in the process of writing a Vine Of Liberty plug-in to handle theming and some other missing features. The one that irks me the most is not having a quick link to the comments section of the page.

We’d like to hear what your thoughts are on the banner and icon. The Icon is likely to change, but Ally did an outstanding job getting the banner done. That was based on the prompt “Modern American patriot guarding a vine in a barren field”.

I’m starting to see the state file F.A.R.P. 28(j) letter, “Citation of Supplemental Authorities”. This is the official way that a party tells a circuit court that something happened that they need to consider before issuing their opinion.

The gist of most of them is, “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited”. Followed by “we are the exception to the rule(s)”.

I am slowly gaining a more in-depth understanding of how ceph works. It is an amazing file system.

It uses replication and I found that it also has “erase coding” capabilities. The erase coding capabilities allow you to reduce the amount of disk space required to achieve full redundancy. The default redundancy is via replication, that is a 3x multiplier. The lowest erase coding is a 2x multiplier and that gets as good as 1.5, when there are enough hosts and OSDs.

We are soliciting articles, you can send your word/LibreOffice articles to awa(at)vineofliberty.com.

Thanks for sticking with us.

Friday Feedback

It has been a rocky end to the week.  GFZ is closing down.  I will be discussing with Miguel what goes, what stays, how long it is up, what might get archived elsewhere.

Currently, there are two official contributors to this site, Hagar and I. I will be posting under my given name moving forward to help separate the “this is an official blog business post” from “this is a person writing”.

We still have the Illinois PICA cases waiting for cert.  They went back to conference and were heard today.

I apologize for the UGLY site.  Hagar is out doing her reenacting this weekend, I am not the “pretty picture” dude.   We’ll get some pretty pictures up soon enough and the site will look better.

Thank you for coming along for the ride.

Please add a comment if you got this far.  I really need to know that it is worthwhile going forward.

Friday Feedback

Today is the day I start shipping the Velcro backers for those people who purchased them. I’m going to lead J.Kb. through the process so he can ship the patches. Thank you for your patience when I jumped the gun.

Miguel noticed my Tuesday Tunes was Sing, Sing, Sing and called me on not posting the best version:

The one version that everybody must hear — Miguel.

You can read about it: The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert

Numerous briefs have hit in the Rahimi case at the Supreme Court. The Court will be hearing oral arguments in November. I’ll start looking at these briefs this coming week. This should be easier as they are all in defense of The People and the Second Amendment.

J.Kb., did you give one of our “Dick Shooters” patches to Clint?

“The War of Northern Agression”

I am old enough that I started school before the Federal Department of Education came into existence. My father was in the U.S. Navy. We traveled around the country as he was posted to different bases.

Sometimes those locations were in “The South” and sometimes they were in The North.

I am an American, first, last and always.

Years ago, in a motorcycle group I belonged to, I made a statement about the Civil War. One of the respected members replied with a question, “How many slaves did Lincoln free?”

The answer is surprising to most. Lincoln freed zero slaves. His proclamation only applied to the states that were in revolt. It did not apply to the states that remained a part of the Union.

This gentleman taught me to look a bit deeper at the history.

That is why I sometime choose to use terms I learned in school. At the time, my teachers taught both sides. Later I learned still more, yet my teachers still treated the south with respect.

If you took offense at my choice in terms in today’s tunes, please ask yourself “Why?” and if you have a good answer as to why I was out of line, feel free to let me know.

Friday Feedback

There were a few big wins in the 2A world this week. We have a case out of Western Virginia, a class action suit, which found that all members of the class of 18,19, and 20-year-olds are allowed to purchase handguns, at a federal level.

This is a district court ruling, and the Judge made it a nationwide injunction. It doesn’t apply to two districts that are also hearing 18,19, and 20 year-olds are part of The People.

We had the District of Columbia surrender and agree to pay millions of dollars in a class action suit for denial of civil rights regarding handgun possession in the District.

The Feds are making pretzel makers look linear as they argue for that The People didn’t include this group or that group at the founding, based on racist laws. Their argument’s would be perfectly reasonable to deny Second Amendment protect rights to people of color.

In other words, the arguments they are making could just as easily be made to justify new racist regulations.

We had an outage earlier this week. We did lose some data. I lost all of my citations and WordFence tables.

Fortunately, those are trivial to rebuild, which we have.

There will be some downtime coming up as I move a boatload of data around. I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

Meanwhile, the comments are open. Please let us know what you are thinking about, what you are interested in, what you’ve heard around the water cooler that might be of interest to us all.